Novels

A Pug Called Poppy

One day Poppy the Pug meets Smudge the Maine Coon cat at the park, and so begins an extraordinary friendship and a series of adventures ranging from a disastrous coffee-and-play group to a terrible house fire. These eight linked stories also introduce Poppy’s human companion Danielle, cheeky Jackson, Baby Gillian, the dog-hating Wenda, and the dreaded Psycho-Cat, proving that no matter what the situation, life is never dull when there’s a glossy black pug in the neighbourhood!

Battered Soles

Is faith only for the devout? Can faith be shared across religious boundaries? These are the questions that Paul Mason explores in this hilarious, wise, and utterly fictional account of a pilgrmage from Peterborough, Ontario to St. John’s Church in Lakefield, one town over.

The Red Dress

Living in small-town Ontario in the 1970s offers little interest or consolation for Charlie Knowles, teenage son of an angry “welfare queen” single mother. Sometimes his world seems “small and dark.” As Charlie resigns himself to another summer of mowing lawns and skirting the fringes of trouble with his best friend, Randy, a chance encounter one weekend changes the direction of his life.One morning Charlie meets Serge Boorman, and soon finds himself befriended by him and his wife, Selina. The Boorman’s life seems everything Charlie’s is not – privileged, sophisticated, and open to possibility. Charlie is smitten by the Boormans, but his mother is less trusting about their interest in her son.The Red Dress explores the seductiveness of corruption and the fragility of goodness; and reveals that even troubled people can have moments of insight. It’s a story threaded with ambiguities, but there is a light cast by one character’s extraordinary wholeness. The Boormans may be past saving, but for Charlie there is, through a young woman named Milly, some chance of redemption.

The Night Drummer

The Night Drummer is the story of two teenage friends–white, middle-class Peter Ellis, and Otis James, a native boy adopted by an older evangelical Christian couple. Peter and Otis grow up in small town Ontario in the 1970s, and the novel follows them through their high school years where both confront challenges that require them to decide who they are and who they want to be, decisions that will have profound consequences not only for themselves, but for their friends and family.

Jim's Star & Other Christmas Stories

Written to be read privately or aloud to an audience, these stories show us how to find and recreate the beauty of Christmas. Paul Nicholas Mason has three novels in print – Battered Soles, The Red Dress and The Night Drummer – but his Christmas stories have been read or heard by more people across the United States and Canada than all three of them combined. The twelve stories in this collection, any one of which can be read to an audience in roughly fifteen minutes, have been shared at church dinners, high school Christmas pageants and around family Christmas trees from Vancouver to Miami, St. John’s to San Diego. They introduce us to a blind beggar and his memorable dance, a young African girl with a magical voice, a poor Filipino lady who gives an extraordinary gift, a Jewish woman who cooks dinner for strangers, an odd little man who creates a remarkable garden, and a traveling Buddhist monk with a message for all of us. Jim’s Star & Other Christmas Stories will feed your spirit.